I Do
by Courtney Belle
Summary: COMPLETE. Silly sort of 'thank you' sequel to Seventeen and Doomed. James has asked Lily if she wants to marry him, and 'I do' is now his favorite phrase. Unfortunately, his friends aren't quite so fond of it as he is. R&R, if you please.


**Author's note:** I got so many sweet reviews for Seventeen and Doomed that I decided to do a neat little follow up as one big thank you to everyone who reviewed. The idea kind of occurred to me when I was reading through old reviews for a bit of an ego boost – what can I say? I'm shameless and they make me happy! – and the whole thing kind of clicked into place, as ideas often do, in the shower. =) Enjoy this rather random character study/one shot/humorous mindless amusement. I sort of whipped it up on a whim, so forgive me if it makes absolutely no sense at all!

DISCLAIMER: I take this moment to say, as I always do, for my own insurance, that I do not own any of these characters. But they own ME. And my heart. And mind, apparently.

**I Do**

I, James Danger Potter, do submit the most useful phrase in the English language. It is even more useful than 'because if you don't I'll hex you' or 'me and this army' because it is A) more polite than either of those things and doesn't require a guttural noise accompanied by a fist pump or the effort of making a wand flourish manly and threatening, and B) much more to the bloody point, if you ask me. Also, it's really non-threatening, unless someone's asking you if you want to hex them with you and your army.

But I digress.

Anyway, the phrase is _I do_. It is two simple little words, probably the two shortest words ever unless you're counting _a_ or...well, I guess _a_ is the only one shorter than do. Besides I, but I is part of the phrase, so fuck that. Okay, anyway, the point I'm making here is that I do is infinitely more useful than anything else because it says so much without saying much, and it's also really fun to say. For example:

Do you want another pint?

I do!

Notice that saying 'I do' instead of 'yes' or 'hell yes' is already more polite-sounding and also makes it sound like you didn't think of having another pint until the barkeep gave you the idea, which can come in handy when your fiancée asks why you drank so many beers. 'The barkeep made me!' is also another good phrase to use when you're in a sticky situation. It's not like anyone can disprove that, right? Right. Or, uh, well...

Right!

Moving on.

_I do_ is also useful when you're being asked a different kind of question, such as:

Do you want to play Quidditch for seven hours straight?

I do!

(At this time it might be appropriate to add 'bloody well' between I and do. 'Bloody well' is probably the second most useful phrase in the English language.)

Do you think you would be happy if Moody got sick and couldn't come to work today?

I do!

Do you like being called James Danger Potter?

I (bloody well) do! I wasn't aware that this was even a legitimate question, really. In fact, I've been toying with the idea of adding Bond to the end of it.

So, you see the usefulness. Imagine saying 'yes' to all those questions. Boring? Bloody hell, yes! And Potters, my father once told me with a solemn look and his hand over his heart as mum rolled her eyes in the background and prepared to throw a rolling pin at the back of his head, are never boring and that's a lesson you'd best learn now before I have to beat it into you.

I miss dear old dad.

I do.

See?! It works for all sorts of rot. Do you like pancakes at 7 PM? I do! Do you think Sirius is a wanker who needs to stop leaving his clothes all over the bleeding bathroom floor? I do! Do you wish that Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans hadn't discontinued _rain_ flavoured beans because they remind you of that bet you made with Lily about the rain and who could go the longest without breaking down and wanting to sleep together? I do!

(And she totally broke down first.)

I think that I could rest my case here and be done with this.

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Or, I could continue to expound on the benefits of using the words 'I do' in every day conversation.

1. You --

"Sound like a complete arse when you use them _for everything_ all the time – " Sirius cracked open the last can of beer and immediately gulped down half of it in one swallow.

James furrowed his brow and set his quill down on top of the brand new parchment that was now the first page of his highly anticipated memoir – _James Danger Potter _by James D. Potter (possibly Bond, if Lily would ever go for it and agree to become Lily Evans Danger Potter Bond when they got married in T minus 4 months, 2 weeks, 3 days, 8 hours, 39 minutes, and 15, 14, 13, 12, 11...etc. seconds), _a tale of a man whose thoughts were so extraordinarily brilliant, he couldn't keep it inside any longer and had to write a book about it._ Subtitled: _Or, what an Auror does when he gets a mandatory week off and is going batshit insane because his roommate drank all the beer and neither of them want to go buy more because the grocery store is a terrifying place that you can never leave and it's like a maze and Remus usually would but he's locked up in some library somewhere doing research even though he's not in school anymore and doesn't really have a job, and Peter is too busy being lame and Lily already said she wasn't going to the store for them anymore._

" – and never fucking stop talking about how bloody amazing they sound."

The empty beer can hit James in the side of the head and knocked his glasses askew.

"I do?"

"Merlin's balls." Sirius scrubbed his hands over his face and reached across the coffee table to grab James's hard work. "When did you learn the word digress?"

"When did you learn how to read?"

"I don't leave my clothes on the bathroom floor."

"You bloody well – "

" –If the next word out of your mouth is 'do', I swear to Poseidon – "

"_Do_."

"That's it."

The parchment fluttered to the ground in the subsequent squabble.

"...hear you say that one more bleeding time..."

"...not fair! Give me back my glasses!..."

"...ow! No transforming!..."

When Remus Lupin finished arguing with James and Sirius's doorknob, which they had charmed to ask a different riddle every time someone tried to put a spare key in it, and managed to turn the handle while yanking upwards on the door and simultaneously hitting a specific knot in the doorframe, gave up and went around to the fire escape to climb in through their bathroom window, tripped over the shower curtain and grumbled a few well-chosen curse words before he used the sink to hoist himself up and almost tripped again on the pile of clothes Sirius had left heaped in front of the door, and stumbled into the living room with all the grace he could muster, he came upon the rather disturbing sight of a large white stag head butting Sirius repeatedly in the stomach.

"Hey."

Sirius waited for Prongs to become complacent, then grabbed him by the antlers and kicked him in the chest. That ignited a whole new round of violence which involved Prongs hoisting Sirius upwards and flinging him into the wall, which prompted Sirius to give in and transform into the shaggy black dog he referred to as Snuffles and James, Remus, and Sirius called Padfoot because Snuffles was a stupid code name.

Remus sighed, set down his bag, and went into the kitchen to find some orange juice. Unfortunately, all his friends had in their refrigerator was milk, and lycanthropes were infamous for killing babies, mauling entire families, roaming in wild packs in uninhabitable wilderness, being uneducated menaces to society, and for lactose intolerance. He contented himself with a glass of water, but had to wait about five minutes for the liquid pouring out of the faucet to turn clear before he could dig a dirty dish out of the bottom of the sink and let it fill up to the brim.

When he had gulped down a pretty significant portion of their water bill for that month, Remus strolled back into the living room to find James and Sirius evenly matched. They had transformed back into themselves, James was standing on top of the coffee table with his wand drawn and pointed at what he thought were the Black family jewels but was really a discarded couch cushion, and Sirius was crouching behind the couch with his wand in one hand and James's glasses in the other.

"I can't see what you're doing, but if it involves my glasses I will _end you_."

"Big talk, James _I can't see without my glasses because I'm a huge loser_ Potter."

"You wish you had the sex appeal those glasses afford me. Hand them over and you can still produce offspring."

"With the cushion?"

"...Shut the hell up, Sirius _I wish I had the sexual stamina of that couch cushion_ Black."

"Are you speaking from experience James _Oh no, Lily can't come over tonight how will I ever live, I'm going to write poetry and make love to this couch cushion_ Potter."

"Expelliarmus!"

Remus caught the two wands when they flew out of his friends' hands and tucked them neatly into his inside robe pocket.

"Remus _Rain on our parade_ Lupin..." James grumbled, rubbing his eyes and blinking rapidly to try and force the vague shapes and colours into concrete objects with corners and definition. Sirius threw his glasses back at him and, due more to blind luck than any of his legendary prowess on the Quidditch field, James caught them in his right sleeve and wiped them clean of any Padfoot germs before deeming them clean enough to set back on the bridge of his nose.

"If I had _not_ intervened and let the two of you kill yourselves over...whatever you're fighting about now, this whole flat would have burned to the ground."

"Which would have allowed us to get rid of all those marshmallows Peter left here."

"Yeah, that," Sirius straightened up and ran his fingers through his hair, which was in desperate need of a pair of scissors. "And we could have burned this stupid parchment."

"What's that?" Remus took a step forward to get a look at the offending piece of innocent looking parchment, but James acted before he could so much as wonder what kind of embarrassing love poems he was writing to Lily now. Things had only gotten worse ever since James proposed and she accepted, which had thrown everyone for a loop. It seemed like only yesterday she had been glaring at him one minute, completely ignoring his existence the next, and basically loathing his very presence when he was anywhere in the same country as her.

Now, it was love poems and love songs and listening to the bloody Beatles over and over again. Now, Remus had nothing against The Beatles, but more than ten consecutive spins of _Revolver _in a single day and he was praying for the full moon to rise and put him out of his misery, mostly because James enjoyed singing along at the top of his lungs and moving all the furniture in the flat around in a never-ending quest to make it more 'inhabitable'.

Remus thought the poor place would need much more than some simple feng shui to accomplish that lofty goal.

James leapt from his coffee table perch and tackled Sirius to the ground in one swift and rather graceful motion. While the two tossers, as Remus lovingly(?) called them in the quiet safety of his very monitored brain (which most certainly did not go shooting off whatever sounded good whenever he thought of it, without taking into consideration all the possible consequences and responses and what alternatives would be better suited to the situation), bickered on the floor and shouted nonsense insults in each others' ears, Remus knelt down and picked the now severely crumbled sheaf off the ground and gave it a read.

He blinked and read it again.

Then he groaned and crumpled it into a wad so it could be properly disposed of and _never_ bother the eyes of humanity again.

"Don't you do it, Moony. That is my _memoir_ and if you throw it away or eat it or something, I'll just have to start all over."

"Or you could branch out and start using the words 'yes', 'okay', and 'sure, why not?' instead of always bloody saying – "

" – I do I do I do I do I do I do I do I do I do – "

"_That!_ Moony, help me put him out of our misery!"

"How can you be _miserable_ when everything is right with the world?" James adjusted his glasses, snatched his quote-unquote memoir out of Remus's hands with such speed that Remus wondered if he had somehow perfected the ability to bend time to his (definitely evil) will, and folded it into a neat little square as he spoke. "I've just seen a face, I can't forget the time or place where we just met – "

"That's it." Sirius rolled up his sleeves with an unsettling murderous glint in his black eyes. "I'm officially killing you."

"Wait!" James backed away. "I'm not done yet. Look, Padfoot...yesterday, all my trouble's seemed so far away and...er, well, now they're still pretty far away if you would stop tackling me and let me finish this brilliant piece of work that children and parents alike are going to read throughout the ages and glean wisdom from because I've got some pretty brilliant thoughts that I haven't even written down yet. And holy shit, Lily is going to be here in five minutes."

The clock behind Sirius' head chimed the hour, but everyone present knew it was an hour and seven minutes slow on Fridays. All the time they'd thought they had to tidy up and walk around in their underwear drinking beer was seriously diminished, and now there were paw prints all over the rug she had gone out of her way to buy them so the living room wouldn't look so depressing and bleak.

"I need another beer." Sirius turned on his heel and made a beeline for the refrigerator.

"You're out." Remus sat down in the nearby armchair and folded his hands over his stomach. "And you need more orange juice."

There was a long pause, during which James hurriedly tried to make his hair lie flat even though he knew Lily would just ruffle it up in the back anyway and put his efforts to pasture within five seconds of crossing the threshold (because the doorknob always let her in without a fuss, and sometimes even without a key – gee, wonder why?), and Remus stared pensively at an interesting stain on the hard wood floors. It looked like either Dumbledore's nose or a very knobbly kneed house elf.

Sirius slowly peeked around the side of the kitchen door and grinned. "Hey, Prongs?"

"Yes, Padfoot?" James was so preoccupied with getting every single spec of dirt off his know rather bent glasses that he hardly paid attention to what his best friend said.

"_I do_ is probably the most useful phrase in the English language, right?"

"Right, you're finally grasping the concept."

Sirius winked at Remus and crossed his arms over his broad chest, which he had puffed out with the pride of a scheme well thought. "And if you were, say, dared to never say anything except one phrase all the time, no matter what the situation or context or who's asking the question, because it's got to come after someone has asked you a question, you would probably pick _I do_, right?"

The door handle turned, because Lily Evans soon to be Potter was always at least two minutes early for every appointment she ever made.

"Right, because it flows so easily off the lips that nothing else beats it. You should give it a try."

"I do." Sirius's grin practically broke every muscle in his face, because Lily appeared in the doorway holding a grocery list so long that it put the list of Hogwarts alumni to absolute shame. "You're right. So, hey, wanna go to the grocery store for beer and orange juice?"


End file.
